Television broadcasting technology has improved tremendously since its inception. Today, television signals are broadcasted on the airwaves through cables and via satellite. The number of stations accessible today has increased from one to hundreds of stations. To select a program to view, many users simply “channel surf” until they find a channel that has a desirable program. Channel surfing refers to the process of using the channel “+” or “−” key to sequentially view each channel. Although some users find channel surfing among hundreds of stations enjoyable, most users prefer a more direct method for selecting a program to view.
Some systems, for example, the RCA Direct Satellite System™ or DSS™ (Direct Satellite System and DSS are trademarks of Hughes Communications, a division of General Motors Corp.), provides a television channel selection guide which displays a listing of the channels typically in numeric order and the titles of the programs broadcasted on the channels. A simplified block diagram of such a guide is illustrated in FIG. 1A. This system has a number of drawbacks. The guide provides only the title of the program. To get additional information, such as a written description of the program, the user must select an information button bringing up a second layer of the menu having the program description.
Other approaches use program oriented electronic programming guide instead of channel oriented programming guide as described above. In program oriented electronic programming guide, the program information is displayed to the user independent of channel information. FIG. 1B shows an example of a display of a menu of the program oriented programming guide. The screen display allows a user to further define the programs the user is interested in, independently of the channels where the programs are shown.
Once the user of the system selects a channel and a desired program, instead of immediately viewing the program, the user may elect to record the program onto a recording device so that the program can be viewed at a later time. When this is the case, regardless of whether the system provides channel oriented programming guide or program oriented programming guide, only the content of the program will be recorded. The title of the program and the description of the program that the user was presented is not part of the recorded program.